This man is not Don Draper

Facebook won countless friends and influenced people, but
after a disastrous stock flotation, Mark Zuckerberg needs to
work out how to win business - and fast

Getty Images

The best type of advertising," said Mark Zuckerberg in his company's first
earnings call with Wall Street analysts in late July, "is
a message from a friend." One of the things I have always
found most extraordinary about the technology business
is the equanimity with which engineers talk
about advertising. Here you have people - largely young
men - bad at interpersonal communications, averse to
showmanship and generally with pretty low-voltage consumer
interests, talking with great authority about how to
move the merchandise. The next most extraordinary thing
about the technology business is that the financial community
which cheerleads its value, and which itself knows very little
about consumer marketing, actually believes that the
engineers can crack the cultural code of high-power
salesmanship.

There may be something here about advertising itself, its
own flippancies and cavalierness and proud triviality, that
has made serious people think that selling ads is an easy way
to make money. And that anyone can do it. And yet, even
allowing that advertising and media might be businesses where
the top minds are, compared with Mark Zuckerberg, mediocre,
his proposition that the best kind of advertising comes
from a friend - Facebook's fundamental business proposition -
is obviously dopey. And it is the reason why, as soon as
investors started to focus on the advertising aspects of the
company rather than the friend aspect, Facebook has been on a
sudden, expectationbending, almost existential, downward
spiral.

To wit: the best type of advertising is advertising that
people remember and that persuades them. Most messages from
friends are garbled, mixed and, often, negative. Now
Zuckerberg may be talking about that vaunted "word of mouth", which
can elevate a message to viral heights, but which in practice tends
to dilute and fracture the message in its constant translation.
Indeed, this is why there is advertising, because even good
products need artful and controlled presentation. Selling is
seduction. And seduction is a complex art.

Certainly, in Facebook, Zuckerberg has made something
without peer. He has taken a new technology and inserted its
use, its ubiquitous use, into the habits, desires and
needs of our times. There is something magical and
shaman-like about this. Facebook's operation might seem
perfectly obvious now. But before it seemed perfectly obvious,
it would have seemed, to most non-techy shamans, entirely
opaque. Or unnecessary. Or irrelevant. Or silly.

In order for Facebook to be worth what investors thought
it would, it will have to sell ads at a cost and velocity never
before achieved

Here's Zuckerberg's proposition: you will
be able to put a list of your friends online; and your
friends will be able to put a list of their friends online too; and
you'll be able to share casual ramblings and observations at the
intersection. Part of the reason why you and I could not have seen
the utility or the cleverness of that concept, and why Mark
Zuckerberg could, lies with his heightened literacy of the
instinctive behaviours that occur in a virtual world. He correctly
saw these lists and the algebraic expansion of the connections they
established among people as precursors to a set of new and
habituating behaviours. That's a brilliant commercial insight, but
it isn't advertising.

Now, we know from the almost anthropological attention
focused on the founding of Facebook - both its actual and
disputed details (the disputed details about howthe company
was founded, then the dispute about the details of the dispute
as portrayed in The Social Network, the film version
of the founding) - that little attention was given to how
this new behaviour would garner money. Neither how, nor how
much. The belief was: if you build it they will come, and if
they come, somehow, they will be monetisable. We will figure
out something - how can we not with so many people hooked on our
product?

But this has been, since the launch of the commercial
internet in the early Nineties, the plan of most entrepreneurs
who were dealing in a change of behaviour instead of an
exchange of goods - and nobody did figure it out (except Google -
more on that in a bit). Hence, advertising became the default
revenue assumption. And, save for Google, every major internet
company that has made advertising its main revenue source (among
them AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and Myspace) has failed in its long-term
business goals.

Now, in another attempt, Facebook climbs this mountain. And
it is the highest mountain yet: in order for Facebook to be
worth what investors have thought it would be worth,
it will have to sell ads at a cost and velocity
never before achieved in the history of media or tech. It
will have to outdo Google. And, indeed, as social media
battles with search engines to become the driver of internet
behaviour, investors have assumed that Facebook would,
in fact, outdo Google in selling ads. Except Google is
not in the advertising business.

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is a contributing editor for British GQ and Vanity Fair. He is also a columnist for USA Today, the author of four books and the founder of Newser.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Michaelwolffnyc